Question

A few years ago, Blockbuster was the dominant competitor in video rentals, but today the company has gone through bankruptcy and is a fraction of its former size. Imagine that Blockbuster had initiated a business intelligence database project 10 years ago to help executives foresee and deal with coming challenges. How might Blockbuster have carried out such a project, and how could it have helped the company?

To begin, consider the first step in the database life cycle, the database initial study. How would you have done a database initial study for a business intelligence database at Blockbuster 10 years ago? What was the company’s situation, and what problems and constraints did the company face? How would you have defined the objectives, scope, and boundaries for a business intelligence database at Blockbuster?

Answer 1

Blockbuster was dominant in the competitive market a few year ago which makes it very clear that they have a sound experience of the industry, they were well aware of the market needs and were successfully able to satisfy the same. Now they have filled for bankruptcy means they could not meet the current market demand.

Before 10 years,if they had adopted the business intelligence database project, it might help to avoid this situation. Business Intelligence is a set of strategies and techniques use to analyze the data available for the business analysis. By adopting this method, the analysis of the current market can be done and according to that the updates can be carried out for the survival form the competition.

Database life cycle stages involves planning, developing, evaluating and implementing a particular environment. The first stage is to plan the new changes needs to be implemented which has initial database study. It gives the idea about the current market situation which is impacting the business. 10 years ago the the phase of CD/DVD was started and online video players was about to start for the video rental market and people had started saying good bye to the big VCR players. DVD players were coming into the market at effective costs and new initiatives for smart TVs are in the designing phase and they have started replacing the old technologies.

The objective of business intelligence can be specified as to develop a system which is easy to operate by the users, can be easily accessible by the employees for the organizational correspondence the better insights to solve the issues pertaining to the application.

The scope of the business intelligence can be identified as the opportunities available for the future. The implementation of Business Intelligence will increase the reach of the organization to the customers who do not have time to come to the place to avail the video rental facilities. They can easily access the same from their place and the satisfied group can increase the customers which in turns increase the business.

The boundaries should also be taken into consideration before implementing the business intelligence which can be specified as to the accessibility available for the computers and mobile devices. Currently it is totally blurred but 10 years ago, we can expect the computer or laptop friendly applications. The smartphones were being dominant into the markets so they need to be taken into account but for the implementation phase, the can be put aside.